Feedback: Bigger and bigger beasts

Bigger and bigger beasts

COPE’S rule, named for 19th-century American palaeontologist Edward Drinker Cope, came from his observation that animals in many groups tended to grow larger over time. Thus horses evolved from tiny Eohippus into deer-sized animals before reaching full size.

Now evolutionary biologist and blogger Craig McClain reports its vindication in a radically independent data set. At bit.ly/CopeRule he observes that the 1954 Godzilla, in the eponymous Japanese film, was 50 metres high. This year’s Godzilla is 150 metres tall.

Such empirical observations are always tastier when seasoned with a proposed mechanism, and McClain has one&colon; the monsters are keeping up with the skyscrapers. “For Godzilla to continue to plough through buildings in major metropolises,” he writes, “a more formidable size is needed.”

The sign that Victor Lovedale sends says&colon; “WARNING Stereotypical lookalikes operate in this area”. Feedback fears this may be Art, and disqualified from our series of signs

Great towering measurements

FOR those following Feedback’s fascination with units, McClain, above, measures Godzilla heights in Empire State Buildings&colon; in SI units, 381 metres. The first Godzilla was 0.13 ESB, the latest is nearly 0.40 ESB. We await figures on the evolution of the building’s most famous habitué, King Kong.

Help number number helpers

LET us count the ways in which writers have groped for illustrative expressions to hold readers’ hands on the journey to grasping quantities&colon; height in Empire State Buildings as above, mass in blue whales… Or maybe not, for now we need a metaphorical representation of the number of such ...

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